Discusses sociotechnical issues that arose in the design of a national digital learning system intended for use by more than a million students and their teachers

1. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 1
Designing Software for a Million
Users
A story about a socio-technical system

2. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 2

3. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 3
2007
Collaboration
tools
Educational
content
Document
management

4. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 4
Why me?
“There are a number of contractual stakeholders identified as users of
Glow. These are the 32 local authorities, the 7 faculties of education
within universities, Learning and Teaching Scotland, the Scottish
Qualifications Agency, Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Education and
the Scottish Government itself. “

5. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 5
Replacing Glow
December 2013

6. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 6
Remit
• Deliver a specification for a system to replace Glow
– Deadline was end- 2012
– System has to be acceptable to the teaching community
• Must be compatible with educational experiments in
1:1 device provision in schools and BYOD.
• Budget unspecified but ‘significantly less’ than the
current Glow budget of £5 million/year

7. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 7
Digital learning
environment

8. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 8
Potential users
658, 000 52, 000
650, 000
10, 000

9. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 9

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Software
complexity
Technical
complexity
Governance
complexity
Management
complexity
Environmental
complexity

11. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 11
Technies don’t
understand other types
of complexity
Non-techies don’t
understand
technical
complexity

12. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 12
Governance complexity
• Education Scotland
– Responsible for managing the Glow service and deciding on the
tools to be supported within Glow
• Research Machines
– Responsible for providing the Glow service, system enhancement,
etc.
– Service also seen as basis of product to be sold elsewhere
• Local authorities
– Hardware and network provision. Content filtering.
– Often outsourced to IT companies (BT, Fujitsu, etc.)
• Schools
– Policies for Glow use; Some hardware provision.

13. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 13
Environmental complexity
• Heterogeneous hardware platform from 8 year old
PCs (honestly) to iPads
• Network connectivity from <1Mbit/second to 25
Mbits/second
• Wide range of content filtering policies across local
authorities
• Government structure
– Legally, Scottish Govt. can only advice local authorities on
policies – they cannot compel them to adopt policies
• Education is a newsworthy issue

14. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 14
Software engineering
Establish the
requirements for the
DLE
Define an architecture
for the system
Stakeholder consultation
Use-case modelling
Prototyping
Conflict analysis
System modelling,
ADLs,
UML

15. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 15
What didn’t work!

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Requirements engineering!

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Viewpoints!

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“We don’t need a
new system, just the
freedom to use what
is available”

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System modelling and the UML!

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Prototyping!

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Use-cases!

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Software engineering meets
reality
Prof. Ian Sommerville
School of Computer Science
University of St Andrews
Scotland

23. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 23
Reductionism
• Reductionism
– “an approach to understanding the
nature of complex things by
reducing them to the interactions of
their parts, or to simpler or more
fundamental things”.
• Its focus is on the parts of a
system, not the relationships
between those parts
• Reductionism underpins most
engineering, including software
engineering

24. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 24
Reductionist assumptions
Owners of a system control its
development
Decisions made rationally, driven by
technical criteria
Definable problem and clear
system boundaries
No single owner or
controller
Decisions driven by
political motives
Wicked problem and
constantly renegotiated
system boundaries
Reductionist assumptions
Control Rationality Problem definition
Large-scale complex IT systems reality

25. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 25

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27. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 27
Jack is a primary school teacher in Ullapool, teaching
P6 pupils. He has decided that a class project should
be focused around the fishing industry in the north-
west Highlands, looking at the history, development
and economic impact of fishing. As part of this, pupils
are asked to gather and share reminiscences from
relatives, use newspaper archives and collect old
photographs related to fishing and fishing communities
in the area.
Pupils use a Glow+ wiki to gather together fishing
stories and SCRAN to access newspaper archives and
photographs. However, Jack also needs a photo
sharing site as he wants pupils to take and comment
on each others' photos and to upload scans of old
photographs which they may have in their families.

28. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 28
Jack sends an email to a primary school teachers group
which he is a member of to see if anyone can recommend
an appropriate system. Two teachers reply and both
suggest that he uses KidsTakePics, a photo sharing site
that allows teachers to check and moderate content.
As KidsTakePics is not integrated with the Glow+
authentication service, he sets up a teacher and a class
account. He uses the Glow+ setup service to add
KidsTakePics to the services seen by the pupils in his class
so that when they login, they can immediately use the
system to upload photos from their phones and class
computers.

29. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 29
What happened?

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Trusted professionals

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Architecture for adaptability
•

32. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 32
Deliver capability not features

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Implementation
experience

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Lessons learned

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Coolness!
“It has to look cool or the
kids won’t use it”

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Digitising Government
Delivering technology to people
who don’t really want it and who
won’t really see any real benefit
from it

39. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 39
Politicians won’t or can’t accept
that the problems with complex
Government systems are not
technical problems

40. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 40
Government (and EU)
procurement models are
designed for police cars and
paper clips, not software

41. Designing Software for a Million Users Slide 41

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